Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop (review)

As anthropologist Derek Pardue makes clear in his exhaustively researched and insightful ethnography Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop, perhaps no musical culture in contemporary Brazil is as thoroughly permeated by a self-conscious spirit of social protest and subaltern pride as the hip hop movement of the outlying industrial neighborhoods of São Paulo. There in the nation's largest urban center, with over 20 million residents, young MCs, DJs, b-boys and b-girls, graffiti artists, black activists, and community educators have come together to create a uniquely Brazilian adaptation of hip hop as "R.A.P." or "Revolução através da Palavra" - a "Revolution through Words." Pardue makes a convincing argument that although only a handful of rappers like Racionais MCs, Xis, Rappin'Hood, and 509-E in São Paulo and MV Bill and Marcelo D2 in Rio have gained much exposure on a national level (on MTV Raps or the major Brazilian television networks and radio stations), Brazilian hip hop has had an impact that is difficult to overestimate at the level of grass roots cultural activism. For Pardue, Brazilian hip hop promotes a bottom-up, oppositional view that interrogates the enduring contradictions for which the country is famous and the terms of the national hegemonic discourse through which they have been legitimized, like racial democracy, cordiality, tropicalism, and tradition (12). As a result, Brazilian hip hop offers a unique and compelling case study of the struggles of everyday people to transform society (17).

The book's interdisciplinary perspective makes it valuable reading for scholars and students of Brazilian studies, whether they seek information about the aesthetic and entertainment dimensions of hip hop itself or the social, political, and economic processes behind it. Pardue skillfully blends threads of urban historiography and Brazilian culture with current social and political affairs, music and performance analyses, and the first-person accounts of São Paulo hip hoppers, placing them in dialogue with theories of popular culture in anthropology, ethnomusicology, Latin American studies, and African Diaspora studies. Additionally, just as hip hop itself has attracted the attention of great numbers of urban social activists and community educators in Brazil, Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop will appeal to readers interested in the intersections between everyday forms of knowledge and power and more top-down, rationalist approaches to popular education and critical pedagogy.

The book is short, yet dense (not including notes and bibliography, it's only 165 pages); it's divided into an introduction, four substantive chapters, and a short conclusion. In the first chapter, Pardue argues that Brazilian hip hoppers affirm an ideology of "marginality" in an effort to radically transform Brazil's unjust and violent social system. "In short," he writes, "hip hoppers use the material and discourse of marginality to save themselves from further negativity and by extension transform the periphery into a place and concept more akin to empowerment than marginality" (5). He uses ethnographic vignettes to position himself as a white, male, middle-class, American anthropologist studying black activism and hip hop culture in the industrial periphery of São Paulo. He details his extensive contact with hip hop in São Paulo (which took place over some five years total from 1995 until the completion of his manuscript in the 2007) and his methodology, which included attending a staggering number of performance events - 117 in all, 35 of which he recorded in sound and image. He also taped dozens of interviews with MCs, DJs, b-boys and b-girls, graffiti artists, and over a hundred more with hip hop fans, producers, promoters, Web site managers, and others involved in São Paulo's hip hop scene (18). In order to understand what hip hop is and how it works as an "ideology of marginality," he suggests three organizing categories serving as the basis for the subsequent chapters: space, race, and gender.

In chapter two, Pardue expands upon the personal positioning he began in the introduction, reviews the trends of hip...